Sebastian Hassinger • 00:30
Welcome to the New Quantum Era. I'm your host, Sebastian Hassinger. If you've been following this show, you know we've spent a lot of time exploring the different ways people are trying to build a quantum computer. We've had Steve Girvin and Rob Schoelkopf on superconducting qubits, Daniel Stick on trapped ions, Dana Anderson, Alex Keesling, and Mark Saffman on neutral atoms, Leo Kouwenhoven and Chetan Nayak on Majoranas, Pierre Desjardins on carbon nanotubes, Andrew Dzurak on silicon spin qubits — and that's not even counting the variations: Will Oliver on fluxonium, Quantum Brilliance on diamond vacancies, Yvonne Gao on bosonic modes and cavities. What's emerged from all of those conversations is something I think about a lot: this growing sense that the race to build a useful quantum computer isn't converging on a single answer. It's diverging. Every few months, another modality produces a result that's genuinely surprising, and the honest truth is nobody knows which approach — or which combination of approaches — actually gets us to a large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer. Today's guest adds another entry to that list, and it might be the most exotic one yet. Nick Farina is the CEO of EeroQ, and his company is building quantum processors using single electrons floating on a thin film of superfluid helium. That's not a metaphor. There is literally a layer of liquid helium on a chip, cooled below the point where it becomes a superfluid, and individual electrons are suspended above its surface, held in place by their own electromagnetic reflection. It's one of the purest environments in physics. What's interesting to me is how the EeroQ story connects to two themes we've been tracking on this show. The first is modality competition. Last episode, Matthijs Rijlaarsdam from QuantWare made the case that superconducting processors will be the fast compute layer in a heterogeneous quantum stack. Nick has a different view. He thinks electrons on helium can actually combine the best properties of multiple modalities: the fast gates of superconducting circuits, the high connectivity and long coherence of trapped ions, and the CMOS manufacturability of silicon spin qubits. Whether that's a breakthrough insight or a founder's optimism is exactly what we dig into. The second theme is regional ecosystem development. When we had Harley Johnson on in episode 82, he described how Illinois is building the world's largest dedicated quantum technology park on the south side of Chicago, anchored by PsiQuantum and IBM, but designed to host a diverse portfolio of hardware approaches. EeroQ is embedded in that ecosystem. They're headquartered in Humboldt Park. They're backed by the state of Illinois through both tax credits and direct equity investment. And they sit within the orbit of the Chicago Quantum Exchange and the University of Chicago's quantum research community. The bet Illinois is making isn't on one modality. It's on density and diversity — getting enough quantum companies in close proximity that the talent, the supply chains, and the institutional knowledge start compounding. Nick's perspective from inside that ecosystem is worth hearing.

This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It's time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com.

Now, I should be upfront about something. EeroQ has not yet demonstrated a two-qubit gate. That's the fundamental operation of quantum computation. Their October 2025 paper in Physical Review X demonstrated trapping and sensing individual electrons above one Kelvin, which is a genuine milestone, but not coherent qubit manipulation. And in January 2026, they showed they can move up to a million electrons with fewer than 50 control wires, which is an impressive engineering result, but still on the sensing and transport side, not on the computation side. So we're talking to a company that has demonstrated some remarkable physics, but has not yet shown it can do quantum computing. That's an important distinction, and we get into it directly. Nick is also just an unusual figure in this space. He's not a physicist. He came from advertising and tech startups and ended up getting fascinated by quantum mechanics and somehow built a hardware company around it. There's an interesting tension there between the elegance of the physics that drew him in and the hard engineering reality of turning it into a working quantum computer. Let's get into it. Here's my conversation with Nick Farina.

Nick, thank you very much for joining me. I've been looking forward to digging into what you're doing at EeroQ and the very unique modality of qubit you're working on. I think your company is the only one in the world that's actually trying to commercialize your particular modality. But before we get there, would you mind starting with just your personal journey? I always find it interesting to find how people got to the point where they decide, oh, quantum computing is my thing.

Nick Farina • 06:29
First off, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. My personal journey begins with a theater company.

Sebastian Hassinger • 06:38
Which is unique.

Nick Farina • 06:40
Yeah. Which is maybe not the most common answer that you're going to find on your show. But in — let's see now — 2010, late 2010, I joined the board of directors of a theater company in Chicago, and the boyfriend of the executive director was doing his PhD at Northwestern in ultra-low temperature condensed matter physics. He was an experimentalist — is an experimentalist. This is now Professor Johannes Pollanen of Michigan State University. And we just became friends. I thought the work that he was doing was incredibly neat. At the time I was a software entrepreneur, so I was working in technology. It's also important to note that at that point in time, Johannes was not really focused on quantum computing. He was generally interested in superfluids and condensed matter physics broadly, and there were no early indications that we would ever start a quantum computing company together. I just thought the work that he did and the science behind it was fascinating, and perhaps a little bit more interesting than my day job as a software founder. So we stayed in touch — I won't belabor this — we stayed in touch when he went out and did his postdoc at Caltech. And it was during his postdoc at Caltech that Johannes became really interested in quantum computing. This was between 2013 and 2015, so quantum computing was quite a hot topic at the IQIM over there at Caltech, and everyone was debating the pros and cons of different modalities. And then, to put everything together in terms of both how I became involved and also how EeroQ was conceived: Johannes and I, once he got the professorship, were just chatting about life, and I said, you know, what are you going to do with this professorship? And he said, well, at Caltech folks were talking about the pros and cons of various different qubit platforms, but there's one that is aligned to my background that hasn't been fully explored — but if brought to reality, could offer the best of all worlds. So all-to-all connectivity, fast gate speeds, exceptionally long coherence times, basically everything that you might want. And I'm the kind of person who is focused on trust and relationships, and was already captivated by the science behind it. And I'm the type of person to just jump into things. So after a couple of days of due diligence — because my first question was the obvious one, which is why isn't anyone else pursuing this? Right? If this is such a great idea.

Sebastian Hassinger • 10:11
Yeah.

Nick Farina • 10:11
And isn't this something that a large company could copy in ten minutes and us lose our advantage, if we were to build a business? And I learned that neither one of those things were really true. I learned that it's an incredibly difficult field, working with single electrons floating on superfluid helium — that there's only about ten to fifteen people in the world who are truly experts on the system, and it would take quite a long time for a large company to catch up to what we're doing. And the fact that there were so few people in the field answered the question as to why nobody else is doing it. Additionally, for some history on the qubit type: the history dates back to a theory paper in Science from Mark Dykman, who is still a professor at Michigan State University, and his colleague Phil Platzman at Bell Labs, who has since sadly passed away. And this was in 1999. So the first proposal of electrons on helium for quantum computing goes back to 1999. And there were initial experimental efforts. They did not work, for various reasons, and this was in the early 2000s. So the reason it can work now is the toolkit around quantum computing — the control methods we have, the equipment you can buy off the shelf. I mean, we didn't have dry fridges and we didn't have cQED, which is how we control our qubits. So without inventions like these, we would not be able to do the work, and that's in fact why it failed originally. So I said, this sounds like a good business, let's do it.

Sebastian Hassinger • 12:06
Yeah, right. So okay, there's a lot I want to unpack there, but just before I move on — the cQED, that's cavity quantum electrodynamics?

Nick Farina • 12:15
Circuit quantum electrodynamics.

Sebastian Hassinger • 12:17
Okay. So you're using the control methods that were developed around the transmon, essentially.

Nick Farina • 12:26
That's exactly right. Yes.

Sebastian Hassinger • 12:28
Yeah.

Nick Farina • 12:28
So we owe a lot to those folks.

Sebastian Hassinger • 12:33
Yeah. Okay. But you breezed past the fact that the qubits are single electrons and they're floating on a liquid gas base. It's hydrogen, right, or is it helium?

Nick Farina • 12:51
It's superfluid helium.

Sebastian Hassinger • 12:53
Helium, yes, okay. So there's a little pool of liquid helium and a little electron sitting on it like a water bug, basically.

Nick Farina • 13:04
You know, I've never heard it described that way, but that's accurate, broadly speaking.

Sebastian Hassinger • 13:11
Fewer legs, probably.

Nick Farina • 13:16
And we love, of course, the fact that electrons are small, because it allows us to ultimately pack — just based on the density — about a million-plus qubits, potentially 10 million physical qubits, on a single chip. So the system doesn't have, which is one of the other benefits, a need for modular interconnects, at least until you get to ten million-plus qubits, at which point we'll be in a different position than we are today. That'll be a good problem to have. So yes, the system is also CMOS compatible. We start with a CMOS-produced control chip, and this chip is the foundation of our quantum processor and has microchannels etched into it for the electrons. And then what we do is we put a layer of bulk superfluid helium at the bottom of the cell that we encase the chip in. And then what's really nifty about superfluid helium is that it will crawl up walls as a superfluid. So it crawls up the walls of this copper cell we have, and then it coats the CMOS-produced chip with a thin layer of liquid helium. And then the electrons are fired using a filament into this environment, and the electrons are trapped naturally above the liquid helium — a few nanometers above the liquid helium — and are attracted to their own image beneath the helium. And then we control them via the CMOS control chip. That's how we are able to manipulate these electrons, using the cQED toolkit. So it's a combination of multiple modalities when you kind of add it up. And I will mention one more important detail about our journey. So we had originally been looking at using the motional state of the electron to make our QPU, our processor. Well, so we changed to spin qubits — that is a different type of motion, right? No pun intended. So then in 2001 — excuse me, in 2021 — Professor Steve Lyon from Princeton joined us as our CTO. And Steve Lyon has been working on this system since around 2003, and wrote a seminal paper on using spin qubits with electrons on helium in 2003, and it was published in 2006. So Steve said, look, I'd love to join you folks, but you've got to work on the spin state, because there you can get coherence times that are drastically longer — ten seconds or greater. The predictions are for even longer than that.

Sebastian Hassinger
That's amazing.

Nick Farina
Yes, that's a relatively conservative estimate. So yeah, it's a combination of spin qubits, and it looks also like trapped ions, especially the microwave-controlled versions.

Sebastian Hassinger • 17:16
Right. I was going to say, so the control of the electrons is by microwave field that you're creating in, as you said, the CMOS chip that is the container for the liquid helium, essentially.

Nick Farina • 17:32
That's right. Yep. And it's all contained in a copper cell in a cryostat.

Sebastian Hassinger • 17:37
Right. And is the challenge to scaling — I imagine it's getting the microwave control fine-tuned enough that you can actually accurately move around so many electrons in that space with good control.

Nick Farina • 17:55
That's right. That's a key challenge that we've worked on. We recently published a paper showing that we can control up to a million qubits with only fifty control lines. So we are getting better at solving this problem. And the nice thing about these electrons is that they are mobile, which also makes them compatible with any type of future error correction — because I think the error correction that exists in five years is going to look very different than the error correction of today. I don't think that's a very controversial statement. If you want me to come on here and say something controversial, I'm sure I can figure something out.

Sebastian Hassinger • 18:42
We'll get there.

Nick Farina • 18:42
Yeah, we'll get there. But I think saying that error correction will get better is not that controversial.

Sebastian Hassinger • 18:50
No, and I think you're right. It's entering this phase of co-design where the topologies of the chips are being adapted to new approaches for lower-overhead error correction. I mean, QLDPC is sort of the case in point, right? That long-distance coupling is driving architectural decisions. And as you're saying, the advantage for you — it's similar to neutral atoms in that you've got this entirely plastic space. You can move your qubits around however you want to create almost a pseudo-architecture within the device. That's really interesting. How do you carry out gate operations on your qubits?

Nick Farina • 19:35
So gate operations — initially we're using the dipole-dipole interaction. This is going to have gate speeds equivalent to ion traps. And then to make the gates ultimately faster, we will likely move to exchange gates, to speed up gate operations significantly. But that's a little bit down the roadmap. Our first processor will use the dipole-dipole two-qubit gates.

Sebastian Hassinger • 20:13
Okay. And what's an exchange gate? How does that differ from a dipole-dipole?

Nick Farina • 20:17
So to do exchange gates, we basically need to make everything smaller. And these are well known in the spin qubit world. So that's why when I say we're sort of a mix of a bunch of different types of modalities — this exchange qubit concept comes from the spin qubit world. And we're very confident that it's something we can do, because we essentially have to shrink everything down in size, which we can do at a tier one foundry as we move on.

Sebastian Hassinger • 20:57
Gotcha. Okay. Interesting. And so you mentioned the processor that you're building. What's your current status? Do you have an operational device? What's the scale that you're able to produce at this point?

Nick Farina • 21:13
So we do not have an operational device, to answer the question directly. I'm always a believer in being very honest about where we are in our development. But we've done a few things along the way. One — I have to say watch this space, because it's under embargo — but within a couple of weeks or a month, we have an exciting paper coming out from a top-tier journal on one of our main achievements in progress. One thing that I can talk about openly is we have demonstrated the largest CMOS-based architecture of its kind, where we were able to run essentially a mock surface code on that. And we can control an ensemble of 2,432 electrons, and down to packets of one, in a CCD-like structure.

Sebastian Hassinger • 22:22
Interesting. So as you're saying, as an ensemble — so you're not addressing them as individual qubits.

Nick Farina • 22:28
Yes, these are not 2,432 qubits.

Sebastian Hassinger • 22:31
But they're future qubits. Is that the right way to characterize it — as sort of an engineering milestone in terms of standing up your control systems in that architecture?

Nick Farina • 22:43
Yes. Our belief, which is a little contrarian — so now I will say something a little bit interesting — is that scaling is actually the hardest part of building a quantum computer. And that if you look at the last ten years, we've made tremendous progress in qubit quality, in terms of gate fidelity as our leading indicator, but of almost all aspects of qubit quality. And we've made great strides in error correction and in more efficient algorithms. But one area that we haven't really made a lot of progress in over the last ten years has been scaling fast enough to get to the hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of qubits that we'll need for really interesting applications. So the way that we tackled building a quantum computer was, instead of starting off with the two-qubit gate and sort of hoping and praying to find ways to scale from there, we started out in reverse with: what does a million-qubit quantum processor look like, and how might one build that? That is how we came to the belief that you need to use CMOS, because that's the only way humanity has ever shown we can build that many features.

Sebastian Hassinger • 24:22
We can build trillions of things. Yeah.

Nick Farina • 24:24
Yes, exactly. Per second. Right. So if you're able to use that, then why not use that? If that technology has been invented at the cost of over a trillion dollars over forty years, then why not use that technology?

Sebastian Hassinger • 24:39
Right. And how would you compare your approach at EeroQ to a standard spin qubit — pick your favorite spin qubit? Because that's also leveraging CMOS. It's also doing either a single electron or a very small number of electrons per transistor, which is actually a qubit. So it sounds like there's a fair number of similarities. What would you say is the biggest difference?

Nick Farina • 25:07
Thank you for giving me a fairly straightforward question. There's one key difference. Silicon is — and likely, I mean, material science is an evolving field — but silicon is an imperfect material, and this gives rise to trap charges, valley splitting, and a number of issues. Additionally, with spin qubits — which we have infinite respect for, so this is nothing against the world of spin qubits, this is purely the engineering challenge with them — your qubits are stuck inside of the silicon, so they are not mobile. And what we do differently is add this layer of liquid helium, which may sound exotic or difficult, but is actually quite easy and was first done in the 1960s. So that particular system, electrons on helium, is very well understood. So adding this layer of superfluid helium — just think of it as a protective barrier that takes the electron spin qubit out of the silicon and into a perfect environment that's free of disorder or defect.

Sebastian Hassinger • 26:37
Right. Right. Yeah, and when you were describing the physical manifestation of it, it did occur to me that in my mind I was sort of imagining a bathtub full of liquid helium with electrons floating on top. But the way you described it sounded much more like a protective film. And I mean, superfluids are really cool, and that's a really interesting benefit of the superfluid behavior — that it actually climbs up the walls of that chamber and coats all the surfaces evenly.

Nick Farina • 27:10
That's my favorite fun fact: if you put superfluid helium in a glass and stirred it, it would keep stirring forever. It would keep moving, it would never ever stop.

Sebastian Hassinger
A perpetual motion machine. Yeah, exactly.

Nick Farina • 27:29
You've invented your own one.

Sebastian Hassinger • 27:31
Yeah, nice. So okay, the operating environment of the chip itself — does that also need to be, I imagine, since you've got liquid helium inside the chip, you probably need to be in a dilution refrigerator as well.

Nick Farina • 27:51
That's right. We currently operate at around ten millikelvin. We put out a paper in Physical Review X recently that showed that we can control and sense electrons on helium at one Kelvin, which is considerably warmer and could use smaller refrigerators.

Sebastian Hassinger • 28:18
And compared to superconducting, which needs millikelvin ranges.

Nick Farina • 28:22
Right. And to be very clear, we currently do and likely will for the foreseeable future, but we have opened the door with this paper to potentially having a future of operating at higher temperatures — which ironically will help with heat dissipation. So yes, that was work that we were proud of last year as well. So the company is about a decade old, and last year was our highest velocity year, I would say, in terms of things all coming together.

Sebastian Hassinger • 29:00
Yeah, that's great. And I suppose you were an early participant in the formation of the community that's emerged out of the Chicago Quantum Exchange — and the five universities that joined that initially, and the two national labs, and all of the regional focus on quantum as an economic development topic. It seems like EeroQ has really benefited from that set of resources and the community that's built up around you.

Nick Farina • 29:31
Absolutely we have. We decided to make Chicago — Chicago was an intentional decision. We had a national search for our headquarters, and at the time — and this was back in 2021 — we had folks in New York, Princeton, and Michigan, and wanted to have a blank slate and find the best place in the country that was convenient to build our business. And this was even before some of the new and frankly sweeping initiatives that the state of Illinois has taken, like the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, and the $500 million-plus that Governor J. B. Pritzker has put into quantum technologies. And there's, as you mentioned, the Chicago Quantum Exchange. There's a group called P33, which is an offshoot of World Business Chicago. And the Illinois Economic Development Coalition — that's a rebranded Intersect Illinois, so I hope I got that one right. But all of these are incredible resources, and we found that between the local talent and the coordination between all these different groups that are happy to provide resources, we found that it was the best place. And I think that's borne out to be true, because now there's been continued investment. The state of Illinois is actually an investor in EeroQ directly, so they are on our cap table — and indirectly, by providing shared services here and whatnot. So yes, I'm not being compensated to say this, but I really do think Chicago is the best place to build a quantum technology startup.

Sebastian Hassinger • 31:30
That's great. That's terrific. We just had Harley on the show — last week, actually, was when the episode was posted — and that was a great conversation too. I've been involved since I was on the IBM side of the table, with IBM joining CQE very early on. So I've been watching closely, and it really is a model for the other regions that aspire to build a quantum ecosystem in many ways. So you're on the path, you had this high velocity year in 2025, you're on this path to developing a fully functional system. Do you have a sense of how many qubits you want to ship in that first system that outsiders get to kick the tires on?

Nick Farina • 32:15
About 10,000 would be our debut device — is what we're shooting for. And that's only made possible because of CMOS, and because of the work that we've already done scaling. So once we have perfected our two-qubit gates, we are able to, in principle, drag and drop them onto the chip that we've already built, which is called Wonder Lake — the one that we can control the 2,400 electrons on currently. And that chip already has operation zones built in for gate operations in the future. So we take our two-qubit gates, we put them onto that chip, and then we have a quantum processor.

Sebastian Hassinger • 33:09
So when you say two-qubit gates, you put the — so the two-qubit gates that you're working on, that's almost essentially like firmware? It'll be the control sequence required to carry out a particular two-qubit gate — is that the right way to think of it?

Nick Farina • 33:23
That's the right way to think about it, yes. But for us, we're still at the level of: okay, we've proven out that we can work with electrons on helium using CMOS, that we can have exquisite control over them down to the single electron level. Now we're working on building two-qubit gates that will then slot into the architecture that we have already built, if that makes sense.

Sebastian Hassinger • 33:56
So do you have sort of a public roadmap? Do you have a date that you have declared you're shooting for?

Nick Farina • 34:03
We're shooting for late 2028, which can be breaking news for your podcast here. We do not have a public roadmap. We of course have a private one. We like to under-promise and over-deliver. And putting up a public roadmap — it does hold you accountable, which is nice. But on the other hand, we want to deliver something really cool to the community without hyping it up too much beforehand. But we are very excited about what we're doing, and think it could be the best of all worlds.

Sebastian Hassinger • 34:45
Ten thousand qubits in 2028 would be very, very exciting. Do you have a sense for what error correction codes you'd be shipping with that device?

Nick Farina • 34:57
Yes. And to be clear, at the end of 2028 we'd be taping out our ten thousand qubits, so it wouldn't be on the cloud. We would not be cloud ready by the end of 2028, but we would be at the tape-out point of it and have everything designed. In terms of error correction — well, I mean, I'm a big fan, for obvious reasons, of quantum LDPC codes. And if I had to guess, if I had to bet, I would say that a variation on those would be what we will end up using. And we have all-to-all connectivity, so we are compatible with them. But I don't know what the future holds for error correction, which is why we're so proud that the system can work with any different type of error correction, because there will be new and improved ones in the future.

Sebastian Hassinger • 35:58
Totally agree. Totally agree. And sorry, you did touch on this, but remind me — what would it take for you to distribute a workload across multiple ten thousand qubit chips?

Nick Farina • 36:11
So that's a great question. I mean, each chip will work independently. We're building as far up as the control stack. So our go-to-market strategy, which is related to that question, is to get up in — let me take a step back actually. You know, I think the way that the ecosystem is developing is really interesting, and watching new companies form or watching new results come out of academia — that may end up deciding how far up the stack we ultimately go, based upon who we might be able to partner with at various levels of the stack. So that is TBD, but that's generally the right way to think about it. And yeah, so we work up to the control layer right now.

Sebastian Hassinger • 37:18
Okay. And that control layer stops at a single chip, so you don't have a notion of chip to chip, like links to fly qubits across from one chip to another?

Nick Farina • 37:32
Oh, ultimately we look to do everything on a single chip. And I think that's one of the key advantages of the system — that we can get millions and millions of qubits on one single chip. So for on-prem installations, which have become more popular — of course the cloud, I think, will always probably be the leader in how folks access quantum computers. But we certainly have had folks ask about on-prem installation. And for that, we have a key advantage by — you know, you do need a refrigerator. You need a fridge, but as long as you have a fridge, you just need one, and you need one chip in that fridge. And the helium sort of recirculates itself, so it's not like you need someone consistently adding more helium into your system. So it could be operating — it's not like you need an EeroQ specialist on premise all the time.

Sebastian Hassinger • 38:44
Right. Interesting. That's really cool. Well, so you've got this paper that's embargoed right now that's in a peer-reviewed journal. It's coming out within, you said, about a month.

Nick Farina • 38:53
Within about a month. So we'll be excited for this. And we'll be able to share more about the system and our achievements in it.

Sebastian Hassinger • 39:03
Fantastic. Well, it's really, really interesting to hear about, Nick. Like I said, I've been dying to hear more about this modality, because I think you're the only company that I know that is the sole developer of a modality. Everybody else has competition within a modality. So it's a really unique position. It's an interesting bet. It makes a lot of sense. And I'm very much looking forward to that 10,000 qubit machine sometime after 2028.

Nick Farina • 39:31
That makes two of us, Sebastian. So yes, I very much am too.

Sebastian Hassinger • 39:37
Thank you so much for joining me.

Nick Farina • 39:39
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Sebastian Hassinger • 39:46
Thanks again to Nick Farina for that conversation. Whether electrons on helium turn out to be the path to a million-qubit processor or a beautiful physics experiment that won't scale, it's exactly the kind of unconventional thinking that makes this field so interesting to cover, and I think will play a vital role in the development of the entire technology. If you want to learn more about EeroQ's approach, the Physical Review X paper and the wire problem announcement are both linked in the show notes, along with the Chicago Quantum Exchange and the IQMP if you want to dig into the Illinois ecosystem angle.

This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It's time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com.

If you want to go deeper on the topics we cover — research highlights, commentary, and the occasional behind-the-scenes look at what's coming up for the show — sign up for the newsletter at newquantumera.com. It's free, and it's the best way to stay in the loop. And if you have an idea for a guest, a topic you'd like us to dig into, or just want to say hello, reach out through the website — I read everything. If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, or leave a rating or review. It genuinely helps new listeners find us. If you know someone who's quantum curious, send them an episode. Word of mouth is still how most people discover the podcast. Thanks for listening. I'm Sebastian Hassinger, and this has been the New Quantum Era. Theme music by OCH. See you next time.